Yoel is a shadowy governmental arms dealer (a spy?) at the beginning of the novel when his wife dies, electrocuted by accident in the arms of a neighbour. Was it an accident? Were his wife and the neighbour lovers, or did he just come upon the scene and get zapped himself? Yoel's powers of observation are so finely tuned, so sensitive to every nuance but the harder he looks the more everything falls apart. Yet at the same time Oz has created a character blind to everything important in his life, most especially his dead wife and daughter. By the end of the novel it seems as if Yoel has entirely lost the thread of truth he has been so desperately trying to find (maybe that is the problem he is so obsessed with the truth he entirely misses the wonder of life). His daughter, mother, mother-in-law and a potential new lover are gone. He has either lost it or become some sort of Jewish saint, or perhaps both.